[low_tech_love]

Sure, but if I may digress a bit, don’t fool yourself into thinking that if you had paid more attention to the lessons you would actually have learned more. You might, but maybe not as much as you think. As a teacher myself, I believe that people put too much weight and unfair expectations on the formal process of learning, especially in the classical structure we have in most schools/universities.

It goes something like “I need to learn X; let me take a course on that, surely this will do it.” But then two things happen: the feeling that, by taking the course, you are doing what needs to be done in order to learn, you get lazy and sit back and expect it to happen passively. It won’t. Second, your teacher might not actually be very good, which is fine (most of us have no idea what constitutes “good teaching” in any repeatable way) and might give you lessons and assignments that may be more of a waste of time than anything else.

My point is: if you want to learn something, just go and do it. Odds are you are probably doing better than if you were in a course. If you are doing a course, then consider it as “time slot allocated to X” and try to be as independent and proactive as you can; it is much better than relying on a teacher.